Senator McCain Wants to be Starting Something

Senator You Know Who is on the warpath again, and it's a humdinger as usual.  He thinks the US should be promising military assistance to Ukraine.  I am not surprised that he's saying that--I'm just kind of surprised if anyone by now is listening to it. I think there's a qualitative difference between, say, providing air support for Libyan rebels or providing defensive weapons to Syrian rebels, from what McCain is suggesting--arming Ukraine against Russia--which Russia is bound to take some kind of way.

The magic question being--"and then what?"

In the case of Libya or Syria, US interests are limited, so our investment in the outcome is kind of hedged. There. I said it. Freedom from a dictatorial regime is a great goal for any nation, and the guarantee that a better government will necessarily emerge is not a certainty. The best outcome is a government with whom one can do business without that nasty human rights abuses taste. Our control over that is pretty limited--and it's for the best it is. Who died and left the United States the boss of any other country? That doesn't seem to be what we should be about.

But here we have a particular region of Ukraine that has become sort of occupied (dare we say "invaded" if Russia wants us to believe something other than our lying eyes?) and has recently voted in a referendum to become independent where the choices were "Yes" and "Fuck, yes!" I'm not sure that even Putin thinks he should overstep his welcome beyond Crimea. And I don't know that we've seen resistance that even looks like the protests leading up to the ouster of Yanukovich from the people being invaded. I'm not saying it's "happy, happy". I'm saying, I don't know what we want to do, here, or with whom. So let's don't.

But of course, that isn't McCain's way of thinking. To his way of thinking, there must be people just champing at the bit for the kind of help only the US can supply, which is to be named later and escalated as necessary. Wow--do I not think we should commit to something as open-ended as that! Yes, I'll agree that sanctions don't look like much and as a matter of fact, might not do so much, but yeah, if a land-grab is about economics ("a gas station masquerading as a country" is a pretty good line, I'll admit), sure--why not wage this one economically, not militarily? Russia has a mess of skin on the game economically, and the Russian oligarchs have a bit of say in what the government is going to do.

But just to rub in what I see as the incoherence of McCain's issue with Obama's foreign policy, here, Steve Benen pointed out how McCain wants our adversarial situation with Russia to be the Cold War, but not. But the Cold War. 
 
Christ Almighty--remember Czechoslovakia, why don't you? (I think it was invaded because LBJ was squishy on Viet Nam, right? All the eyerolls.) Or maybe I am thinking of how Iran funded Al-Qaeda? Or how we are all Georgians, now? McCain is inconsistent with reality, but consistent with wanting to war on something.

I'm pretty sure he could ask his doctor if there's a patch for that.